


Too Drunk To Fuck

by apiphile



Category: Withnail & I (1986)
Genre: Drug Use, M/M, Post-Film, unconventional pairing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-09
Updated: 2010-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-07 20:18:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Marwood leaves, Danny and Presumin' Ed move in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Drunk To Fuck

It's like a game of musical fucking chairs; Marwood moves out one rainy afternoon in October and Danny – unwelcome, unasked, unwanted, unwashed, and without any warning – moves in. He brings with him the odour of true failure, because you know you've really hit rock bottom when London's worst dealer is wanking in the bedroom next door.  
The first Withnail knows of this unsavoury addition to the household, the man who uses pages from fucking Blake to roll joints, is when he staggers home in need of a slash and for the second time that year is confronted with a spade in his bathtub.

Withnail is not drunk enough, at this point, to have forgotten whose fault a cheerfully stoned black body in his bath is likely to be; with his affinity for all things, substances and persons Jamaican, Danny can be the only culprit.

With a clatter and a bang the flat's original tenant slams the bathroom door and stamps up the stairs to the flat to give Danny a drunken lecture and ask how the fuck he got in _this_ time, since after the last invasion of the Potheads Withnail yanked the drainpipes off the wall. He's only been listening to the water pouring off the roof past his window for three days; Danny works fast, burrowing in like a fucking tick.

"Danny!" Withnail snarls, but he gets no reply. After stalking around the flat yelling to no avail he collapses on the sofa like winged pigeon and looked up to see the frankly enormous spade standing in the doorway with an off-pink towel around his thick waist.

"Danny's out," the man-mountain Withnail vaguely recalls as having a stupid nickname rumbles with a serene expression.

"I can _see_ that," he snaps, pulling his coat around himself. It's a sheer scientific wonder that Presumin' Ed can stand about half-naked in this intolerable cold. Withnail supposes bulk must play a role here; there is a good deal more to Ed than there is to Mr. S. D. Withnail.

"'E's gone to get cabbages," Ed elaborates, standing like a statue in some Buddhist temple. It is always "get" with Danny, and never "buy", but everything, even advice, has a price. Fortunately he is usually too spaced to recall who owes him what.

"CABBAGES?" Withnail is not sober enough for sarcasm. He settles instead for pop-eyed dismay. "What the fuck does he want cabbages for?"

A man of considerably less esoteric tastes than Danny and considerably more forbearance than Withnail, Presumin' Ed merely shrugs his huge brown goose-bumped shoulders and says, "I makin' coffee. You want some?"

Which is when Withnail realises that the arrangement might not necessarily be all that bad.

He finds it even more bearable when, a week later, a big Wanker from the site down the street takes a dislike to Withnail – perhaps his dress habits, perhaps his manner, perhaps his of Irish poetry exacerbated by the standard Englishman's contempt for all things hailing from that celebrated isle – and makes an enthusiastic lunge just outside the house with some intention of removing Withnail's unwise tongue from his aristocratic head.

Things are prevented from becoming ugly by Presumin' Ed sliding open a window in a cloud of pot smoke and mildly informing the Wanker that he is unfond of aggressive disturbances and that if at all possible he would prefer it if he could have his flatmate back in one, living, piece. Ed is the most pacifistic of non-confrontational laid-back cats, but the Wanker, six feet and two of enraged stout-soaked but murderous Derryman, is not to know this. He abandons Withnail to his fate and instead fires off a loud salvo of abuse toward the open window, centring chiefly on Ed's parentage, ethnicity, sexual proclivities and dietary choices.

Ed listens with interest for a moment, while Withnail bounces off the front doorframe twice, and shuts the window while the big drunk Wanker is informing all within earshot of the "crazy nigger"'s child-masticating ways.

It is not in Withnail's nature to indulge in displays of gratitude; it is not in his nature to _feel_ grateful, and so when he meets Presumin' Ed in the hall he simply calls him a "black bastard" and passes out gracefully on the stairs. His new flatmate slings the unconscious old Harrowvian over his shoulder like a sack of coal or a fresh-killed deer carcass and carries him up to the bedroom without so much as a sigh.

One Sunday morning not much later Withnail awakes in his customary position – half hanging off his bed, face-down with one arm painfully twisted beneath him and a mouthful of sawdust and regret – and the scent of something frying reaches his hungover nostrils and he thinks this time he's actually died and somehow he has escaped the burning hot place below. It turns out – when he's wobbled and stumbled to the kitchen (Danny has been MIA for five days and Withnail misses him like a bout of gonorrhoea or a visit from the Inland Revenue) – that it's plantains, but Ed lets him try some anyway.

He's not sure he likes it. He's not sure he dislikes it. His stomach grasps at the solid food desperately and he takes a second slice. Ed raises an eyebrow – the most admonition he's ever shown – and moves the pan out of Withnail's clumsy reach. "You'll burn yourself."

Withnail eats his own bodyweight (hardly a prodigious amount but more than he is used to) in fried plantain that day and makes himself very sick. He blocks the toilet and is forced to poke the thing clear again with a fake leg that Danny has – for reasons probably not known to Danny himself either – left in the bathroom with a copy of _Penthouse_ balanced over the straps at the top. When the ghastly experience is over he falls asleep in the bath with the allegedly "hot" tap dribbling over his chin and torso.

Possibly as a result of this, Withnail gets a chest infection. While he is bedridden and coughing up green and yellow goo, too ill even to go in search of medicinal brandy, Danny returns from wherever the hell he's been (Luton, Danny says, but Withnail doesn't believe him and doesn't care) and sells one of Withnail's heirloom suits. And Ed leaves – gone, Danny says, to visit his brother and sister-in-law in Bristol. St Paul's. The biggest collection of Rastas in England. Except, Danny corrects, Presumin' Ed is not a Rastafarian –

"Why not?" Withnail snaps, wrapped in a dressing gown and an eiderdown and a wool blanket as well as his winter wool coat. He can barely move to smoke. He wouldn't be out of bed but the last time he tried smoking in it he fell asleep and set his eyebrows on fire – they have still not quite recovered, lending him a surprised air which is entirely artificial.

Danny shrugs and licks the strip side of a Rizla. "Ask 'im yourself when 'e gets back." He stretches out in what Withnail can't help thinking of as Marwood's seat. "Presumin' Ed is merely a wise man what knows the worth of the weed but not, as you have erroneously assumed, a Rastafarian."

"_Shut up_," Withnail complains, holding his head and singing his eiderdown with his cigarette.

Two days later Presumin' Ed returns with a weight from his brother and Danny and Ed get so spaced that the former tries to watch TV on the toilet cistern. He insists there are koi carp living in there and that they're telling him stories; it is very _good_ weed. Ed simply watches his own hands move with a warm smile and says nothing.

Withnail, who is a little better and somewhat annoyed at not being offered any of the monster joint that has been passing back and forth, watches Ed from the doorway, still wearing his improvised poncho from days ago (it was cold, so he cut a hole in his blanket with a kitchen knife – he has been glaring at Danny, _daring_ him to say that this is strange).

The man's hands are enormous, like shovel blades with sausages stuck to them. Withnail thinks one of those hands could pull his head clean off his shoulders as though it was opening a bottle of pop. He leans on the doorframe; Ed gets fascinated by his own hair and starts poking and prodding the whole woolly mass.

Downstairs in the bathroom Danny starts to sing ALL YOU NEED IS FISH in a voice like pipecleaners and Withnail curses the day as blighted before staggering back to bed.

He later acquires (like Danny, Withnail does not _buy_ things, he acquires them, often on a promise that both parties know will not be kept) a gallon of whiskey and has to enlist Presumin' Ed's assistance to get the bloody thing up the stairs to the flat. Etiquette demands that he offer demands that he offer some to the spade once he's shifted it; habit demands that he join the man; nostalgia decrees that he feel miserable as the very lowest kind of sinner when he realises he last drank this particular kind of scotch in the company of Marwood, stuffed in a pissing horrid cottage in the hills going slowly mad with withdrawal, cold, and longing.

He is quite drunk when he accusingly informs Presumin' Ed, "you've got _big hands_," as though it's an affront to his very religion. Withnail props a lit cigarette behind his ear and shrieks in exaggerated pain and Ed, the big black fucking bastard, chuckles at his plight. A moment or two later one of Ed's huge fingers – paler on the underside than the top and pink-nailed – brushes ash out of Withnail's hair.

"Jus' generally big," Ed observes in the silence that follows. Withnail has more scotch, because it's there and he's very bad at pacing himself and a spade just touched his ear and he didn't think to flinch. "You're long," Ed adds meditatively, sitting back in the armchair.

"_What_?"

"You're long and thin," Ed observes, placing one enormous slab hand on the ancient globe that Danny has labelled with drugs (Mexico, Jamaica and Afghanistan are inky with fountain-penned notes) and singed with ill-marked ash from his larger joints. "In your hands."

This leads to Withnail trying to focus enough to see his own hands and determine the level of correctness in Ed's statement. It takes quite some time.

"Yes," Withnail says eventually, holding up the nicotine-stained white knife of his fingers.

"'s good," Ed assures him. "Long and thin."

There is silence and then, because Withnail is intelligent but not always _clever_, he repeats the trick with the fag and burns the back of his ear again.

This time it is Ed's fat thick thumb that quite slowly smoothes the ash out of Withnail's ear and strokes it with casual deliberation born apparently of contemplation rather than avarice, carnality or any of those other things. Withnail sits still and frowns a bit until Ed has finished wiping away the ash and his hand, like the footfall of God, falls upon Withnail's bony shoulder.

"Orright?" Ed enquires, and Withnail squirms. Ed begins to laugh like an earthquake; his chuckles come from the depths of the darkest caverns, deep and big and booming, always alarming and always genuine.

"I _will be_ when you stop manhandling me," says Withnail firmly, only it comes out as a tremulous croak which would shame a sick toad. He tries to grope Ed's huge hand from his clavicle but when he gets hold of the back of the thing Ed turns his hand over and cups Withnail's in its warm, rough massiveness and that's rather comfortable so Withnail leaves it there. _Also_ he's petrified that if he offends Big Presumin' Ed he'll come away short one arm and possibly his head. Scared. That's what he is.

In the flat the only sound is the _blip-blop_ of water from the leaky tap falling into the overloaded sink. Withnail cannot unstick his tongue from the roof of his winter-dry mouth and his heart beats like a marching band going over the cliffs of Dover.

Ed's fingers curl up around Withnail's and give them a friendly squeeze, and Withnail can hear his own blood pounding in his ears. And Ed says:

"Maybe not tonight, no. You're too drunk."

Withnail finds himself less relieved by this statement than he'd have otherwise assumed he might be. He even feels a little disappointed when Ed lets go of his hand and does nothing more than idly ruffle Withnail's wild and unwashed hair like an errant breeze.

"Maybe not _tonight_," Withnail repeats, and he's sure that Ed's response is really a smirk.

Danny returns (from Worthing this time, apparently, as though Withnail cared) and he has mushrooms which he wants sixpence a go for. Withnail calls him out and tells him he's a highwayman and reminds him whose flat it is; Danny gives him a _possibly_ good-natured stare from behind his tea-shades and reminds Withnail how much money he owes already and Withnail calls him a crook and another word beginning with a C. Presumin' Ed takes two Ed-sized fistfuls out of the box and says he will pay Danny back when Danny's paid _him_ back, and it's settled just like that.

When the hysterical laughter fades time goes elastic. Ed's hands, hot and rough, cradle Withnail's head like an egg. Just cradle it. Like an egg. Withnail becomes seized with the idea that his head really _is_ an egg and that Ed is going to crush the weak shell and spill his brains out in a frying pan. He would get up and hide the pan but Ed is holding his head and he can't –

"Man," Danny sniggers with slow derision," you have no head for mushrooms."

"His head is nice," Ed observes in a rumble. His fingers flex on Withnail's cheeks.

"But not one for drugs," Danny repeats, holding his own hair up in handfuls like radar dishes and emitting _beep_ noises under his breath.

"That is because it is an _egg_," Withnail says with great dignity and forbearance. Danny explodes with giggles and Ed's big bass laugh vibrates through the room and through Withnail's body like waves through a still green millpond. The sound has pink and purple notes. They uncoil like soft, warm tendrils in Withnail's gut and legs and make him bonelessly relaxed; the idea is not as disturbing as it ought to be, and Withnail knows now that his belief that his head was an egg is clearly absurd: his head is a ball of _wool_.

"My head is a ball of wool," Withnail announces. It is very important that Danny and Ed know this, in case they think he is still an egg and try to eat him. "Danny, you have _ears_. Why – "

"I'm going," Danny says, rising with great aplomb and grace, "to get cabbages." He nods to Presumin' Ed. "Don't shave," he says by way of a farewell, "hair transmits joy into your mind. Without it we are powerless. That's Samson, that is." He salutes them both and weaves out of the door on the third try. The floor must be swaying.

Withnail can't tell this, because he is somehow sitting on Ed and Ed is gazing intently at the third button on his coat. Withnail can see why: it _is_ a fascinating button. The daylight is at a different angle and he gets the impression that time has passed but he's not sure where it went.

Ed's hand, he realises abruptly, is on the back of his neck. It is the same temperature as Withnail's neck and Withnail's been a bit distracted by his coat button and maybe that's why he hasn't noticed. He wonders how long it's been there without him knowing, but at this moment he also knows that time is a ridiculous concept, that all times are now and that now he is apparently being stroked like a small cat.

He has every intention of telling Ed that he is not, in fact, a small cat, but it's possible he never gets around to it. The next truly coherent thought he has is, _it's very cold_, and the reason behind it appears to be that he's naked. The nudity side of affairs has not stopped the fascinated stroking.

Most of all, Withnail is faintly irritated that he's simply too fucked on mushrooms to work out whether he's really _being_ fucked or just imagining it.


End file.
